William Broyles Jr Cast Away (2000)

William Broyles Jr. (born October 8, 1944, Houston, Texas) wrote the screenplay for Cast Away (2000). He had previously been a Marine Corps infantry platoon commander in Vietnam, the founding editor of Texas Monthly, the editor-in-chief of Newsweek, and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter for Apollo 13 (1995). For Cast Away he stranded himself alone on a beach in Mexico's Sea of Cortez to research the survival sequences — a research method that found the film its emotional center when a Wilson volleyball washed ashore.

Vietnam shaped the way Broyles wrote about isolation

Broyles served in Vietnam as a Marine infantry platoon commander. He has said directly that without that prior experience of extreme duress, of bonds formed in survival situations, he could not have written Chuck Noland's island sequences the way he did.

"It's the metaphor for my Vietnam experience. I was living an ordinary life and suddenly was swept away into a strange world where I didn't have the skills to survive, and I had to learn under very difficult conditions." — William Broyles Jr., Military.com (2025)

After Vietnam he became a journalist — Texas Monthly's founding editor, Newsweek's editor-in-chief — and only later turned to screenwriting. His first major credit was Apollo 13 (1995), co-written with Al Reinert, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. (wikipedia, Texas Monthly)

He had himself dropped on a deserted beach to write the survival scenes

Broyles flew to Mexico's Sea of Cortez and arranged to be left alone on a beach with no supplies. He had to find water, build shelter, open a coconut, spear food, and try to make fire. The Boy Scout fire-making method did not work — local people eventually had to teach him the trough method, the same technique Chuck eventually figures out in the film.

"I went to the Sea of Cortez to see what it would be like to live on a deserted island. I was dropped off by Mormon hippies on a beach with nothing. I had to survive, build shelter, open a coconut, get some water, all of it." — William Broyles Jr., Yahoo Entertainment (2020)

The research yielded the film's mechanical details — the failed fires, the cuts, the coconut struggle. But the more important discovery was emotional. Near the end of his stay, alone and lonely, a Wilson-brand volleyball washed ashore. He picked it up, put shells on it, and started talking to it.

"I was getting ready to leave and was really lonely when a volleyball washed up on the beach. I picked it up and looked at it, put some shells on it, started talking to it. That's the movie." — William Broyles Jr., Mental Floss (2016)

The volleyball gave the screenplay its solution to a structural problem: how to write a single character on screen for sixty minutes without voiceover or flashback. Wilson became Chuck's interlocutor — the externalized voice that lets the audience track Chuck's interior life through dialogue.

The script went through 125 rewrites with Hanks and Zemeckis

Tom Hanks brought the FedEx-plane premise to Broyles around 1995, immediately after Apollo 13. Broyles developed the screenplay over several years; Hanks then brought Robert Zemeckis on as director after they finished Forrest Gump. The script went through 125 rewrites before shooting. Broyles has said the screenplay's distinctive feature — long stretches with no dialogue — was the hardest part to write and the easiest part to defend.

"The most emotional part of the film is when he loses Wilson. That's when the character surrenders to the ocean." — William Broyles Jr., Yahoo Entertainment (2020)

Selected filmography and journalism

Year	Work	Role
1973	Founded Texas Monthly	Editor
1982–1984	Newsweek	Editor-in-Chief
1986	Brothers in Arms (memoir)	Author — Vietnam memoir
1995	Apollo 13	Screenwriter (Oscar nomination)
1998	Entrapment (story)
2000	Cast Away	Screenwriter
2000	The Polar Express (later co-written with Zemeckis, 2004)
2003	The Mexican (script doctoring)
2003	Unfaithful	Co-screenwriter
2006	Flags of Our Fathers	Co-screenwriter (Eastwood)
2006	Jarhead (later)	Adaptation